Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations, by Thomas Achord and Darrell Dow (584 pp., $24.99). The headmaster of a classical Christian school has teamed up with a statistician to collect and sort thousands of quotations pertaining to human relationships from myriad religious, political, and historic figures. The result is an invaluable reference for patriots...
Who Is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations, by Thomas Achord and Darrell Dow (584 pp., $24.99). The headmaster of a classical Christian school has teamed up with a statistician to collect and sort thousands of quotations pertaining to human relationships from myriad religious, political, and historic figures. The result is an invaluable reference for patriots...
Catholic & Identitarian, by Julien Langella (Arktos Media; 338 pp., $38.95). French commando Dominique Venner committed suicide inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2013 as an act of protest against unrestricted Islamic immigration. One cannot but censure Venner’s sacrilegious act. Yet, calling attention to the existential threat to the West in general and France in particular is a...
Catholic & Identitarian, by Julien Langella (Arktos Media; 338 pp., $38.95). French commando Dominique Venner committed suicide inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2013 as an act of protest against unrestricted Islamic immigration. One cannot but censure Venner’s sacrilegious act. Yet, calling attention to the existential threat to the West in general and France in particular is...
Frequently, pro-life leaders draw a parallel between slavery and abortion. “You Say Abortion Is Legal? The Supreme Court Also Legalized Slavery,” reads one popular bumper sticker. The motivation for this comparison is understandable, since slavery and the Civil War occupy central places in the American historical imagination. By gesturing toward one of the issues associated...
However much they may enjoy watching Captain von Trapp sing “Edelweiss” in The Sound of Music, most Catholic intellectuals nowadays are squeamish about delving too deeply into the production’s historical background. Such reticence is hardly surprising, for in Von Trapp’s day Catholic Austria was led by Engelbert Dollfuss—a man deeply enthusiastic about his Germanic heritage,...
Having mistakenly thought that he had killed his rival during a fight over a girl, 16-year old Simon Kenton headed west from Virginia into Kentucky. Before he turned 20 Kenton had established himself as a first-rate ranger and Indian fighter, and he had become a frontier icon by the time he died in 1836 at...
With Independence Day festivities approaching, Chronicles readers may be interested in a public lecture about patriotism which I gave in Louisville this past year. It has always seemed to me that before we can begin to intelligently discuss border control, Southern heritage, kneeling NFL linebackers, or any other given controversy, there is an even more...
For generations Latin was the backbone of Christian civilization, and served as the basis for political, intellectual, and religious discourse during the most creative periods of European history. And, as a number of scholars have pointed out, the relatively recent abandonment of Latin by educators coincides rather strikingly with American culture’s collapse into vapid superficiality....
Following the 1862 battle at Perryville, the angry Unionists who held the Kentucky town declined to bury their slain foes. When the stench and sight of wild hogs gorging themselves on corpses finally proved unbearable, the task of laying the dead to rest fell upon one Henry P. Bottom, the secessionist upon whose once-prosperous farm...
Not everyone here in the Bluegrass State was delighted by the 2007 opening of the Creation Museum in Boone County. “There’s been such a push in recent years to improve science education,” a representative of the Kentucky Paleontology Society gloomily observed, yet creationism “still hangs around.” Church-state separation activists were particularly upset that the government...
In one corner, there is Kentucky’s upbeat governor, whose attractive wife, five biological children, and four adopted children compose a family too large to fit into the traditional governor’s mansion. New England-bred Matthew Bevin speaks out for religious freedom, promotes infrastructure on behalf of orphans in Africa and India, and has tried every trick in...
“Breathitt County in east Kentucky is the only county in the United States not to have had selective service enforced during the Second World War. That was because there were so many volunteers.” —Gordon McKinney Since I have long been convinced that the Appalachian South embodies a grounded yet radical alternative to the American mainstream,...
Nelson County, Marion County, and Washington County are collectively referred to by their inhabitants as the Kentucky Holy Land, and I don’t think the expression is meant to be entirely whimsical. Settled in the late 18th century by English Catholics from Maryland, the rolling green country is to this day marked by cattle farms, distilleries,...
Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion. Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious. At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work. Once we consider...
“Human rights are not isolated, private, and ‘at war’ with each other,” explained Sue Ellen Browder, former journalist for Cosmopolitan and author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement. “Human rights are indivisible.” The occasion for Browder’s reflection was the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, a date...
My first exposure to Alexander Dugin came via YouTube, when I discovered Vladimir Pozner’s 2014 interview with the controversial theorist. Marred somewhat by cultural relativism, Dugin’s critique of Anglo-American empire nonetheless contained more depth than a year’s supply of the Washington Post. Civilization cannot exist without a willingness to use lethal force on its behalf,...
In Hungary last October, U.S. diplomat André Goodfriend noted that Americans’ “right to express their views would be protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Making clear that his sympathies lay not with U.S. citizens arrested in Budapest but with the Hungarian officials who had arrested them, he hastily added, “We’re glad to...
Was it fair of Solzhenitsyn to call Peter the Great “a mediocre man, if not a barbarian”? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that history didn’t begin with the Cold War, and that long before Solzhenitsyn, renowned novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky expressed reservations of his own about the historical impact of Russia’s most...
Since his election to the Senate in 1984, Mitch McConnell has been the bête noir of Kentucky progressives. Like Halley’s comet, the slogan “Ditch Mitch” has appeared again and again, and McConnell’s adversaries have made a recurring cathartic ritual of venting hatred upon him. Time after time, Mitch has come out on top, forcing even...
Will Russian philosophy gain a foothold in Russia? It already has, laments David Brooks in a New York Times op-ed (“Putin Can’t Stop,” March 3). Brooks finds disturbing Vladimir Putin’s tendency to quote the likes of Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Soloviev, and Ivan Ilyin; more worrying still, the Kremlin has recently sent copies of these three philosophers’ works to...
Those blissfully ignorant of right-wing soap opera will have never noticed the Antichrist Right, a loose coalition of writers who regard the Church as the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization. If I understand correctly, the Antichrist Right would describe Christianity much as Christianity defines evil: a shadowy, parasitic negation that possesses no...
Wendell Berry’s voice is rich and mellow, carrying a slight grit that comes from weathering, age, and experience. His accent is strong enough to flavor his words but mild enough to soothe his listeners. It is a surprisingly gentle voice for one so radical. I sit listening to the Kentucky gentleman. With me are a...
At first, our taxi driver asserts that the United States will surely triumph overseas—thanks to the teams of dedicated, patriotic geniuses who diligently work in the field of American foreign policy. On second thought, he wryly reflects, the Soviet Union employed teams of geniuses, too. At least, that’s what my wife tells me he said;...